Arts & Culture | Theater

More than half a century after the end of the Third Reich, the Shoah still reverberates in the lives of the survivors’ grandchildren. In Dana Boll’s new play, “Bella’s Dream,” based on the refugee experiences of her paternal grandparents, memories of the Holocaust keep seeping and bleeding into the present.

Can a building do justice to the horror of the Holocaust? In Oren Safdie’s new play, “False Solution,” an egotistical German-Jewish architect (Sean Haberle) engages in a battle of wits with a sexy blonde intern (Christy McIntosh) over his plans for a new Holocaust memorial in Poland. As the two struggle to find common ground in their visions for the building, each is forced to come to grips with his or her connection to the Shoah. The play begins previews this week in the East Village.

John Houseman once said that Patti LuPone exudes the “smell of the gallows,” but for one gay Jewish boy from Los Angeles, the star was nothing less than a lifeline. LuPone, famed for playing blistering, brutal Broadway divas, became an obsession for theater artist Ben Rimalower when the teen was struggling with his parents’ divorce, his father’s traumatic coming out, and his own coming of age.

Shattered, soul-less husks, wandering in an alien landscape — such is the impression given by the Holocaust-eviscerated characters in Isaac Bashevis Singer’s 1966 Yiddish novel “Enemies, A Love Story.” Paul Mazursky made a film of it in 1990, starring Ron Silver, Anjelica Huston and Lena Olin.

The struggle to free Soviet Jews was one of the most successful protest movements in history, and it brought close to three-quarters of a million Jews to this country. But just a few decades later, studies show, many Soviet Jews feel alienated from both their Jewish and American identities.

Karel Švenk’s “The Last Cyclist,” written and performed in the “model” concentration camp of Terezin, comes to the Upper West Side this weekend after a circuitous route to the New York stage. The cabaret-style play, which is a farcical allegory of the genocide of the Jews, was banned by the Jewish Council in the camp, for fear of reprisals from the Nazis. Adapted by Naomi Patz, it has its New York premiere at the Church of St. Paul and St. Andrew after productions in St. Paul, Chicago, and other cities.